


for a healthy heart

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-29
Updated: 2013-09-29
Packaged: 2017-12-27 23:39:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/985011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A strange black box appears in Castiel's bedroom one afternoon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for a healthy heart

Dean isn’t sure when the Box appears. It only enters his awareness after it’s been present for a while, like a Polaroid taking too long to develop. A small dark wooden box, with an antique lock, and the first time he really notices it is when he sees it on Castiel’s night-stand one afternoon, and realises he doesn’t recognise it.

Cas is downstairs, with Sam, poking through old files or something, so he slips inside the sparsely-furnished room and goes to the night-stand and leans down to see. A finger pushed beneath the lid shows it to be locked. He frowns; straightens.

The Box is quiet. Nondescript. It’s probably just another one of Cas’ newly acquired human eccentricities, like his fondness for Mildred Bailey records or his habit of dogearing books a certain way or his growing collection of bottle caps, stacked in tumbling piles on his desk. Either way, it’s clearly private, and not Dean’s to pry into. He leaves it be.

* * *

 

He forgets about the Box soon enough. A few days later it has completely slipped his mind and everything is normal. Sam’s still a little weak, but he’s always weak these days. Cas, who has been consistently taciturn since the Fall, hasn’t gotten any more or less quiet; he’s just Cas, with his morose and melancholy mouth, reading stacks upon stacks of old lore by lamplight every night with a scratchy Bailey record mumbling through the walls.

The sound of Mildred’s voice is becoming Dean’s lullaby. There’s something comforting in knowing that just down the hall Cas is awake and alive and reading a book, keeping vigil in his own way, even if he’s not a force of nature anymore.

Dean passes Cas in the library, his index finger scrolling down a page, and cuffs him on the shoulder. “How you feeling?” he asks, absently, as he moves away again.

“I don’t know,” Cas says calmly, as if that in itself is an emotion.

Dean doesn’t think to find that answer odd until a few hours later. _I don’t know?_ Cas isn’t the best at verbalising sometimes, being still somewhat new to full-on human emotions and all, but he’s got all the basic vocabulary—happy, angry, sad. _Uncertainty_ isn’t an emotion.

But then, they’re all a little off their game these days.

He sees the Box again, quite abruptly, later that night, set carefully on the table at Cas’ elbow, as if at any moment he’ll need to reach inside it and find something important. But he doesn’t. It stays closed, and Dean doesn’t ask.

* * *

 

Cas gets quieter—unnervingly so—and that is when Dean starts to worry.

On a good day Cas isn’t exactly ripe for endless conversation; he’s still sad, still hurting, still figuring out exactly what he feels good for in true human skin. He pushes himself into books and research and practising his aim in the range and helping Dean look after Sam. But he talks, when prodded. Sometimes he even laughs. Or at least he used to.

There had been a strange little moment, a few weeks before, in which Castiel had said something to him—had said, in an instant of strange and inappropriate sincerity, _I love you,_ and Dean hadn’t reacted right—hadn’t had time to think or to formulate thoughts and he’d foolishly let it dissipate into the air without acknowledgment, had cleared his throat and said _love you too, man,_ in the way that friends told friends that they were loved, had grinned and coaxed an uneasy smile out of Cas in return and felt guilty and low for it all day, but it hadn’t come up again save in the extra silences and ducked heads that Cas directed towards him, an awkwardness, another level of quiet. But everything had been okay. Dean had been sure of it. It was something that could be talked about later, when everyone had their bearings again. Just not then. Not so soon after everything had fallen apart.

Now Dean’s lucky to even get a _good morning_ out of him. He comes downstairs in the morning with the Box under his arm and the Box sits next to him while he quietly eats his breakfast and the Box accompanies him into the library where he quietly studies the day’s texts and the Box goes with him, back upstairs, quietly, at the end of the day, and he never opens it or even seems to acknowledge how strange it is that he’s carrying around a Box everywhere he goes, and never using it.

Sam’s noticed it too, now, and he asks one evening after Cas has taken it into his room, “What’s in that thing?”

Dean doesn’t have an answer. But after the sound of Mildred Bailey cuts off from Cas’ room that night, well towards one in the morning, Dean creeps down the hall and into his room.

Cas is in bed, shirtless under the covers, and the light from the hall passes briefly over a scar on his chest from a wound that Dean doesn’t recall him ever receiving. He looks at the Box in the dim corridor light. Just a box, closed and locked.

He puts his hand on the lid, experimentally, flat. Nothing happens. But later, on the verge of falling asleep, he wonders if there wasn’t something—something very small—a sort of throbbing in his palm.

* * *

 

Cas comes downstairs with the Box one morning and sits down in an armchair in the library and doesn’t get up. It sits in his lap, small and dark, and he holds it with two hands and doesn’t move.

Sam calls to him to come eat breakfast, but it’s as if Cas doesn’t hear him. Frustrated and concerned, a little after noon, Dean crouches down in front of him and snaps his fingers next to Cas’ eye; Cas flinches and blinks and looks at him.

“Hey, man, are you okay?” Dean asks. “You’re kind of starting to freak us out a little.”

“I don’t know,” Cas says. His face is entirely blank, and this is what unnerves Dean the most. There’s not even a flicker of feeling in Castiel’s eyes—not sadness, not exhaustion, not happiness, not even calm. Just dead space, stretching back for ages.

“You don’t know if you’re okay?”

“No,” Cas says, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to not know.

Dean leaves him be, but hovers near the doorway of the library all day, watching him sit there. He feels antsy and afraid, worried, almost, that Cas is just going to stop talking and stop moving altogether until he vanishes without a sound into the air.

That night after the record player goes quiet, after he’s sure Cas is asleep, Dean creeps into his room again and takes the Box out into the light, and turns it over in his hands. Its surface is unmarked; it’s just a box. Nothing on it seems cursed or evil or strange. Just a black antique lock. Just four walls of wood.

His fingers, where he touched it, throb all night.

* * *

 

They go on a hunt, although Dean is hesitant to put Sam back out in the field just yet, and is hesitant to put Cas anywhere. But Cas rides in the back seat, saying nothing, holding the Box on his lap.

When they corner the werewolf in a back alleyway Cas is the one who kills it, rounding a corner and riddling it with silver in the span of a minute and a half, and by the time Sam and Dean catch up he’s already standing over its corpse, his breath frosting in the air, looking down at it without interest or emotion. Something about that sends chills up Dean’s spine.

He cradles the Box like a child all the way back to Kansas and doesn’t say a word.

* * *

 

Dean realises, slowly, that he hasn’t heard Mildred Bailey in a while.

* * *

 

He distracts himself in the rooms that litter the back parts of the bunker, full of bookshelves that haven’t been touched by anyone in generations, alphabetising and pulling out anything that looks useful for the modern day. Sam’s in something of a relapse; Cas, as far as he knows, is sitting out in the library again, unmoving, holding that damn Box as if it’s the only thing that matters.

He almost misses it—the broken line in the dust along a bookshelf, where some slim volume has been removed and replaced, but when he sees it, he frowns. He knows Sam hasn’t gotten around to exploring this room yet; he’s been too sick. And the broken line is fresh, a week or two old at most.

He sticks his finger in the dark space of the shelf and pulls out the book. It’s almost laughable, when he sees the cover—faded lettering that looks like it came from a mail-order catalogue, broken words like _llwork_ and _unre_ and _olution._ There’s a red Men of Letters stamp on its corner, one of the sigils for a cursed or dangerous artefact, so he opens it carefully, and its spine cracks in his hands.

It falls open to a page that has been dogeared in the way that Cas dogears his books, and Dean squints at the tiny print littered beneath an illustration of an eye. The passage is long and complicated and seems pointlessly labyrinthine; he picks his way up to the top, to a slightly larger bit of text, like the thesis statement in a paper.

_For a healthy heart_ , it says. _Cut it from your chest—_

The palms of his hands begin to throb. His fingers stammer, slamming it shut, and he jams the book back into its place and lets the door of the room swing open when he leaves.

* * *

 

“I need to see that box,” he says, and Cas looks at him and says, “No.”

Sam is upstairs, feverish in bed, and Dean’s not doing too well himself. His brother’s fits are stressful and surprising and now Cas is sitting here, in this armchair, defiant, holding the damn Box like a holy relic, his face a perfectly blank mask of nothing. _Nothing._ Not even a single thing that Dean recognises as _Cas_ anymore. It’s just a face—Jimmy Novak’s face, painted onto plaster, with no life in it.

“Cas,” he says—his throat is hot and he wants to cry because he knows he is right about the Box and he knows it is horrible—“just let me see the box, alright?”

“Why?” Cas says, and tilts his head, and everything about him is so _dead_ that it makes Dean’s skin crawl and his fingers throb, throb.

“What’s in it?” Dean asks. He stares as hard as he can into Cas’ eyes, tries to find him somewhere in there, but he can’t, he can’t. “What’s in it that’s so important?”

Cas doesn’t say anything. He just stares back.

“Give it to me,” Dean says, hoarse, “please.”

“No.”

“Why?”

Silence.

He hears Sam coughing upstairs, loud and hacking and probably bloody, and he feels an awful twisting in his gut; it’s been weeks since Cas was Cas and that, right now, is too much, too much taken from him. He can’t help Sam, and he’s alone in this bunker in the middle of nowhere with no one to help him and no one who is _alright,_ a little brother who is probably dying, and now Cas, who he knows that he hurt, who he seems to be constantly hurting, is drifting rapidly and completely away and it’s scaring him to death and he needs, he _needs_ to see what’s in the Box, needs to know if, somehow, it’s his fault, because the line in the dust, the grin, _love you too, man,_ he can feel them on his shoulders, in the corners of Castiel’s glassy eyes, and he doesn’t know what they mean, all together, but they must mean something, held all at once in the palm of his hand where they seem to be made of all the same things.

He reaches down and touches it and Cas tightens his hold on it, pulls it back towards his stomach, but his face is still as motionless as it was before, and that makes Dean _furious._

He tears the Box out of Castiel’s hands and Cas scrambles for it, dead eyes flashing, lips a straight line of nothing, his hands reaching and grabbing like claws or talons, and he says, “Dean,” and the name is like a corpse coming out of his mouth.

Dean yanks it out of his reach and stumbles back, but Cas’ hand knocks into his elbow hard and he drops it—straight down onto the stone floor where it splinters at one corner and cracks open, the barest bit.

They stop—both standing, staring down at it.

Something is creeping out from its broken edge—dark.

Dean breathes, and Cas looks, vacant, and it creeps more and more into a round, smudged shape until it meets the light and it’s red. Blood.

Mechanically, Cas crouches down and picks it up. The lid is broken, now, and he lifts it, tilts the Box. Something meets the back wall of the Box, wetly.

Dean feels as if he’s going to be sick.

He reaches out, slowly, and takes the Box from him, and this time Cas doesn’t fight back, and Dean swallows the nausea down and looks in.

The walls of the Box are carved with spellwork letters in a language he doesn’t know. In the corner of the Box is a human heart, beating gently.

“Cas,” he says, because he can’t say anything else. “Cas.”

“It’s fine,” Cas says, monotonous. He touches Dean’s hand and Dean flinches violently, nearly drops the Box again, but doesn’t. “It’s fine. Look at it.” But Dean doesn’t want to, and he doesn’t want to think about the scar he’d seen on Castiel’s chest, and he doesn’t want to think about what he’s holding.

“It’s fine. See?” Cas says, gently taking the Box back, and closing the lid again. “No one can hurt it ever again.”

“Cas,” Dean says, feeling heavy-headed with tears, and frightened, “Cas,” and Cas sits down with his broken Box and looks straight ahead, and doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t say a word at all.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [a tweet](https://twitter.com/NightValeRadio/status/351543911572963328) from @NightValeRadio.


End file.
